Roger Hedgecock: The enviro zealots

Top Stories

How else to describe self-appointed environmental activists who fight to reduce our water supply, drive up the price of healthy food, and top it off by actively creating future shortages of electricity?

San Diegans are environmentalists. We love our climate, our shoreline, our mountains and everything about natural San Diego.

Local political campaigns have long been about preserving and enhancing our “quality of life.”

But there are militant activists among us who really believe the old Club of Rome charge that “The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.”

They are zealots.

Decades ago, the zealots objected to bringing water into San Diego from Northern California and the Colorado River, demanding that seawater conversion was the better way to go.

When a desalination plant was actually proposed in Carlsbad, the zealots objected to that, too, and held up permit approvals for more than a dozen years.

It wasn’t the source of the water they objected to; they just didn’t want San Diegans to have any more water as a way to limit the number of people here.

The zealots have been campaigning to tear down reservoirs and dams including the Hetch Hetchy Dam, which supplies San Francisco with drinking water.

Common sense compels the construction of more dams to store water for droughts like the one we’re in now.

Hydroelectric generating plants in dams like the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River are carbon-emission free, yet still the zealots rage against them.

Last week, the zealots got the federal appeals court in San Francisco to do a reverse rain dance. The court ruled that, during the current drought that has already stretched water supplies thin, Northern California water, contracted to flow south to farmers in the Central Valley, must instead flow through the Sacramento River Delta into San Francisco Bay and out to the ocean to protect the Delta smelt, a two-inch bait fish.

This despite an absence of any scientific evidence that the smelt appreciate the water or the sacrifice humans are making for them.

What a sacrifice. The Central Valley is becoming a dust bowl. Farmers are on well water until that runs out. When the water is gone, the farmers are gone.

Consumers will make a sacrifice, too.

Ninety-plus percent of the entire U.S. consumption of crops like almonds, broccoli and peaches comes from the Central Valley. Not this year. With supplies down, prices for a variety of nut, vegetable and fruit food basics are set to skyrocket.

Environmental zealotry is a tax on consumers which will hit poor Americans the hardest. For a two-inch fish.

Based on the scientific evidence presented in the Jane Fonda movie “China Syndrome,” zealots have long campaigned against all nuclear electrical generating plants even though these plants have zero carbon emissions and (with hydro power) are “planet friendly” alternative sources of energy.

When one of two nuclear power plant units at San Onofre shut down due to faulty plumbing, both plants were temporarily idled.

Emboldened zealots led by Sen. Barbara Boxer bullied Southern California Edison to permanently close both units even though they could have been repaired.

With 20 percent of San Diego’s current electric supply suddenly gone, SDG&E raced to contract for electricity from “alternative” sources and reactivate proposals for natural gas-fired power plant projects.

Zealots who had championed solar energy for years, fought proposed solar power plants in the Mojave Desert..

The Mojave is ideal for sunshine but the zealots, led by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, objected because the solar plants might damage the habitat of the desert tortoise.

The Mojave Desert covers 48,000 square miles. The solar plants cover several thousand acres. My guess is that the tortoises are grateful for the shade from the solar panels.

Zealot opposition delayed the construction of the solar plants and the availability of the electricity generated by them.

Zealots also objected to the natural-gas power plant proposals because of CO2 emissions from the plants. This from the same people who had just shut down San Onofre, which emitted zero CO2.

Apparently, the zealots just don’t want the rest of us to have electricity, period.

Where’s the balance? Where’s the common sense?

Because of the zealots, Californians face higher prices and diminished supplies of electricity, water, and food. The poor will be hit the hardest and the middle class squeezed even more.

Politicians, particularly the Democrats who control state government, should support abundant electricity supplies and statewide desalination plants with water enough to green the Central Valley again.